


forgiveness with teeth

by buckynatalia



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Braven-Centric, F/M, Post S2, Sharing a Room
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-05-13 09:52:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5703334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckynatalia/pseuds/buckynatalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One winter night Raven shows up in Bellamy's tent and asks to crash on the floor for the night. They're good friends, aren't they? They can brave a snowstorm together. Maybe they can brave anything together. Maybe they can stop running, for once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "What no one ever talks about is how dangerous hope can be. Call it forgiveness with teeth."  
> -Clementine Vons Radics, That Spring Everything Grew Wild and the Rain Came Down Like Punishment

 

  Nothing changed when the mountain fell. The Ark still lay fallen in the valley, like the skeleton of a great dragon that had been slayed long ago. Every morning was colder. Frost grew at the edges of tarps, winter holding us in a chokehold. And every morning, we’d try harder to build something like a society around this skeletal piece of space debris. Lucky us. 

 

  The sickly people of the Ark turned their faces towards the sky. Their children would forget the claustrophobic spinning of space, they’d never know the threat of a parent being floated for some bullshit crime. They knew this was our home now. Their eyes opened just a little wider.

 

  Nothing had changed since we crash-landed in the middle of this goddamn forest. The sun rose in the morning and set at night. There were forty-eight of us still alive, forty-seven if you didn’t count Clarke. Some days I’d walk around the camp, talking and trading and listening for anything that needed to be heard. Most days the delinquents would avoid making eye contact. Some of them were still wound up tight, their muscles made from wire. Some of them had those jagged holes in their hips where the marrow had been tugged out. Night wasn’t a time for sleep, anymore. It was a time for remembering.

 

  Yeah, okay, I’m a fucking liar. Nothing was the same, and we were left with nothing to show for it. Clarke Griffin had become nothing but a whisper, a rumor, something that sounded like Wanheda. Knives were sharpened. Grounders seethed at the edge of the woods while we pretended not to see. The treaty held, for now.

 

  It was hours past midnight when Raven Reyes appeared in my tent with a grimace carved into her face. Raven's hair was half fallen out of the ponytail and her cheeks were flushed pink, with alcohol or with anger I couldn’t tell. Maybe both. There was a stuffed-full knapsack slung over her shoulder. Or there was, until she dropped it on my bed and turned to look at me. Her eyes were huge, a deep rich brown and red-rimmed from crying.

 

  Shit.

 

  “Can I crash here tonight?” asked Raven. She was already unpacking her knapsack and clearing a space on the floor. I handed her the extra bedroll I kept under my bed. Her hands were shaking.

 

   “Make yourself at home,” I said.

 

   Raven sat down and peeled off her brace. “Thanks.”

 

  “Don’t mention it,” I said, sitting down at the edge of my bed. Her knapsack sat on the blanket, gaping open. She’d brought three changes of clothes, half of a toolkit, and not much else. The kind of thing you’d pack if you were on the run. “Everything okay?”

 

  “Everything’s fine,” she said slowly, letting her hair fall to her shoulders. She lay on her back with the blanket pulled up to her chin, staring at the red patchwork that made up the ceiling. Raven looked empty. She didn’t seem fine at all. 

 

  I frowned. “Really?”

 

  Raven shook her head. “I don’t wanna talk about it right now.”

 

  “Then don’t,” I said softly. Raven didn’t owe me shit, not a smile or an act, not even an explanation. I knew that she was carrying around more than she could carry. Her hands were more callouses than skin, and sometimes when Raven thought no one was looking, her head would bow in exhaustion. Soft breaths came from her mouth, dissolving like smoke into the bitter-cold air.

 

  “Why are you still awake?” she asked me, a moment later. 

 

  “I was reading,” I said, and showed her the crumbling paperback I’d found. Raven turned it over in her hands,  flipping the dry pages gently. It was marred by water and time. Some parts were undistinguishable. It was one of the best things I’d ever seen. 

 

  “Jesus,” she ran a finger down the spine. "Where’d you find it?”

 

  “I traded it for a knife and a pair of socks, actually. Good trade."

 

  “Gross,” said Raven, her nose crinkling up. “Who wants your nasty-ass socks?”

 

  I smiled. “That’s why it was a good trade."

 

  “I’d say so."

 

  “Goodnight, Raven,” I said. 

 

  “Goodnight,” she said, and switched off the lamp that sat on the floor next to her. 

 

  A few minutes later, snow began to drift from the sky. Wind howled outside and the whole tent shuddered. It collected on the tarp that served as the rain fly, I could see the silhouettes of each one. They say each snowflake forms differently. They say whole cities could be buried beneath the weight of it all. None of us believed our eyes when the first snow fell, a few weeks ago, we figured it must’ve been some sort of prank. And then we felt it melt in our palms, collect in our hair. I remembered Octavia, smiling up at the sky while a winter storm swelled around her. The widest smile I’d seen in months.

 

  Now snow was just another problem, one step closer to hypothermia.

 

  “Raven,” I whispered into the darkness. Something moved. “Do you want to sleep up here? You . . . It’d be warmer with two of us.”

 

  “Makes sense,” murmured Raven. “After all this, I don’t want to bite it because of the fucking cold.”

 

  She climbed into my bed, all elbows and hair smelling of woodsmoke. It was warmer with her here. Even if the cot wasn’t quite big enough for two people, even if strands of her hair kept getting into my eyes. Raven fell asleep before I did, shifting to rest against my side. My shoulder fell asleep after a few minutes. There wasn’t enough pillow for the both of us. 

 

  At least neither of us would freeze to death. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raven tells Bellamy his tent sucks. Octavia is hiding something. It's Raven's birthday and she doesn't want to be alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "There is a kingdom in me,  
> and sometimes it is burning.  
> Sometimes, I let it.  
> I promise never to hide this from you.  
> That is my vow.  
> I promise to be an open mouth.  
> I promise to stay fractured.  
> I promise to be imperfect.  
> I promise to be the bravest  
> broken window you’ve ever seen."   
> -Caitlyn Siehl, Difficult (via thatsyourgold)

 

  * \- - - - - - 



 

  We’d been here before. 

 

  Except then. Then it had been sweat and tangled limbs and the sheen of resentment on her skin. It had been a way out. I remembered her hands curled against my chest. The red light from the lamp, the murmur of people sitting around the campfire not twenty feet away. Raven Reyes was a dream trapped inside of a girl. She deserved better than this.

 

  Now Raven's head rested on my chest, rising and falling with every breath I took. She looked younger in her sleep. Peaceful even. Less like the hard-edged badass who could cuss you out or blacken your eye without a second thought. More like the girl who brought you water when you were sick, more like the girl who looked at you until the truth spilled from your mouth. Her hair spilled out over the pillow, shining and long as something out of a fairytale. She’d leave strands of long brown hair everywhere, when she left.

 

  Some part of me wondered if I’d seen Raven before, growing up on the Ark. Back when she was just another girl shoving past me in the corridor. Another starving kid with nowhere left to run. If not for the dying space station and the half-baked plan to save humankind? We likely never would have crossed paths. 

 

  And I’m glad I met her. Even with the knives at each others throats, even with the torn-out radio and the disgust written all over her face. We had walked to hell and back. We’d been dragged through forests and mountains, we’d been doused with boiling water and strapped to tables to be tortured. I liked to think that things were getting better. The dreams weren’t as bad, the nights weren’t as long. 

 

 We were safe in Arkadia. Or safer than we’d ever been. Protected behind twelve foot walls that buzzed with lethal amounts of electricity. I was on guard duty whenever I could. Raven had a job selling used parts, sitting behind a table and arguing with anyone brave enough to haggle with her. It almost tasted like normalcy. It almost looked like we could have a future.

 

   Raven’s eyes opened. She sighed deeply, disoriented, like she was already exasperated with this new day. Tendrils of hair were pasted to her temples. Her eyes were swollen with sleep. Raven glanced over at me with half-lidded eyes. “Shit . . . Sorry I fell asleep on you."

 

  “It’s okay,” I murmured, trying to ignore the sound of boots walking past the tent. The tremor of hundreds of people opening their eyes and breathing in the clear air. 

 

  She paused for a moment, running her fingers over the soft fur blanket. For a moment she was completely still. Right then, Raven looked like one of those oil painting we’d ransacked from Mount Weather. Full of color and a false sense of security. “What happened to us, Bellamy?” she asked, her voice deathly soft. Her brace sat small and rumpled on the floor. 

 

  “I don’t know,” I said, and it didn’t feel like enough. I hadn’t forgotten all the times she’d saved my sorry ass from a shallow grave. Raven. Always splitting bullets and fusing wires and hefting a rifle that was half her weight. So I could live to see another day. Right now, her eyes were huge and brown, seeped through with gold. Looking at me like maybe I was something worth keeping. “A lot can change in four months."

 

   “Yeah,” she said, one of her hands trailing absently over her injured leg. “I guess it can."

 

  “How much does it hurt?” I asked her.  Maybe that was a stupid thing to say. Maybe I was only making things worse. Raven gazed at me, her expression halfway between boredom and something more forgiving. 

 

  “Hurts like hell,” she said hollowly, her voice clouded with apathy. Something in my chest twinged. “God, I should be getting to work. When’s your shift start?”

 

  So that’s how it goes, with her. With everything in this world. Forget and move on as soon as possible.

 

  “Soon,” I said. “Fifteen or twenty minutes."

 

  She was already strapping on her brace, rolling thick wool socks over the uncomfortable metal joints. She got ready with a stiff focus, shrugging on her red jacket and zipping shut her backpack. She’d bartered for it a month ago. It was a small and blue, with cracked vinyl on the front, emblazoned with a once-colorful image of two princesses with syrupy smiles. Raven liked it more than she let on. 

 

  “You know they’re building cabins, right?” She sat at the edge of my bed, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. “It’s getting colder and I’m sure you could find space there. You can’t live in this drafty-ass tent forever.” 

 

  “ . . . Drafty-ass tent? That’s a little harsh,” I said. I looked around at the tent, the top of my head brushing against the tarp overhead. It was verging on cluttery, every space on the floor taken up. The air was close. A single ray of dusty light shone through a hole in the ceiling. Maybe Raven had a point. “Honestly, this place is kind of growing on me.”

 

  She rolled her eyes. "You know what else grows on you? Frostbite.”

 

  “Very funny,” I said, lacing up my boots. They still had the name LOVEJOY carved deep into the soles. “I’ll be fine here. It’s not that cold out.”

 

  “It’s fucking cold, Bellamy,” she said. “Last night we literally just huddled together for warmth. Like penguins or some shit."

 

  I smirked. “Penguins?"

 

  “You know what I mean,” Raven said. There was something close to a smile on her face. 

 

  “Come on. I don’t want you to be late,” I said, nodding towards the tent flap. "I’m sure some scrap metal junkie needs to be argued with.”

 

  “Don’t remind me,” she said heavily, shouldering her backpack and ducking out into the sunlight. We walked in the shadow of the Ark, breathing in the smell of cooking meat and wet earth. Birds flew overhead, oblivious to the A slightly grubby child ran past, chasing after her shrieking friend. Raven stopped to look at them running into the distance, her breathing irregular and harsh. Still, it was a happy sight. The kind of wild-eyed joyful childhood neither of us had.

  The mess hall wasn’t far, just a short walk around the perimeter of the fallen Ark. Inside we were immediately greeted with a rush of warm air and the clamor of voices familiar with each other. Two meals a day were served here, food that had been gathered from the surrounding woods. Thank God a decent cook had survived the collapse of the Ark. 

 

  Okay, maybe that was a fucked-up thing to think. 

 

  Raven and I ate together, sitting down at a long table cut from a pine tree. It was fraught with splinters and crowded with people I barely knew. Names were scratched into the surface of the table, some connected with a heart, some standing alone. Raven sat with her elbows propped on the table, shoveling the hot soup into her mouth with relish. I tried not to smile. 

 

  We ate in silence. It was a rare comfortable sort of quiet, without a trace of uncertainty or queasiness. Her boot touched mine under the table, the uninjured foot constantly bouncing up and down, kicking me in the shins. Every once in a while Raven would look up  from her soup, meet my eyes and tell me about something that had happened to her. The punk-ass kid who tried to steal a bracelet from her stall. The trash-eating raccoon she’d trapped herself and traded for a new pair of shoes. Somehow Raven never ceased to be anything but endlessly interesting.

 

  Raven tilted her bowl up and drained the last of it. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I gotta go,” she said, pushing away from the table.  

 

  I nodded. “So do I.”

 

  “Are you free later?” she asked, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jacket. “We could get a drink. And talk."

 

  “Sure, I could use a drink,” I said, And a talk, if you insist."

 

  “Great,” Raven smiled, beginning to walk away. “Don’t do anything stupid on guard duty.”

 

  “Try not to punch anyone over a tin can,” I called, speaking to her back as she walked away. Raven raised her hand to wave goodbye, a bright red spot in the clamor of moving bodies, like a droplet of blood dissolving into water. I lost her quickly in the crowd. But I guess she’d always been good at disappearing. 

 

  The next time I saw her, the sun had set and she seemed to be the only one awake. I remember thinking that her smile glowed brighter than the moon, right then. Limitless. Raven was the iron in the earth and the stars cold and distant millions of miles away. She was the last person who deserved to be lonely, to be in pain, to feel forgotten. And yet.

 

 Maybe loneliness was something that could be shared.

 

\- - - - 

 A week later I moved into a cramped log cabin that almost always smelled like smoke and wet leaves. I shared it with Monroe and Harper and this boy from Mecha Station who almost never spoke. It was cramped and vaguely claustrophobic, but we made it work. We took turns sweeping and killing spiders. We took turns waking up Monroe when she started snoring.

 

  Yeah, I worried about suffocating from the horrible state of ventilation. But it was better than freezing to death. Probably. 

 

  Sometimes Raven would come and fall asleep on our floor. I never really found out why. But it didn’t matter, we had the space and she was always fucking exhausted and it was the least I could do. Raven had a bad case of insomnia and sometimes I’d stay up with her, listening to her go on about the sun and the sky and the strange secrets of people I’d never even met. Smoke climbed towards the ceiling and her voice sounded just like the soft crackling of the fire. 

 

  When I woke the next morning, she had gone. Propped on her pillow was a scrap of paper where she’d scribbled the symptoms of smoke poisoning. Signed Raven Reyes. For someone so smart, her handwriting looked like chicken scratch. I pressed the note between the pages of my book. 

 

  * \- - - -



 

  The days got longer and the sun hid behind clouds for days at a time. After weeks of trembling silence the sky opened up and the rain came pouring down in big fat drops that seemed to have a mind of their own. Arkadia began to look like a ghost town. Mold grew. I trudged through mud and pulled my hood over my head. Earthworms were washed from their homes, wriggling and limp on the dirt. Everyone got a little quieter.

 

  I hardly ever saw my sister. Just in the distance, small as an ant, or across the mess hall with a hundred people between us. Maybe she was avoiding me, I don’t know. Octavia and Lincoln had moved into a small room inside the Ark. I’d been inside once, their windowless janitor's closet that had been cleaned out and lined with furs and pine boughs. Octavia hated it, but it was the only place to go. 

 

  I wasn’t so fond of their room either. Back on the Ark I’d spent hours in there, wringing mopheads and sorting chemicals and disinfectant.

 

  Octavia found me, when I was on guard duty one afternoon. A heavy swath of fog sat in the valley, so thick that I could hardly see the top of the Ark. Hell, I could hardly see twenty feet away. My sister walked with me all around the perimeter, fiddling nervously with a hole in her sleeve. Next it was her hair, picking apart a thin braid tucked behind her ear. The mud sucked at our boots. The knives in her belt slapped against her leg with every step. 

 

  After half an hour, I stopped in my tracks and turned towards her. “O. What did you want to tell me?”

 

  Octavia just looked at me for a long moment. Assessing, like right before a battle, her hand going almost unconsciously to the knives at her belt. She shifted on her feet, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of the little girl who’d never known anything but confinement.

 

   “Me and Lincoln are going to have a baby, Bell. I’m pregnant."

 

  For a moment nothing made sense, not the way she searched my face like a map. Not the way the words slipped out with an edge of terror. But then it clicked. Her small smile wasn’t for nothing. 

 

  I threw my arms around her because there was nothing I could think of to say, the words never came, and we stood there for a long time listening to the wind rustling through the pine trees. Just holding each other. 

 

  “Holy shit,” I said, once there was space for words.

 

  Octavia laughed and swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. Her eyes were shiny. “I just . . . I keep thinking how none of us had a real shot at a childhood. You were taking care of me and I was hiding under the floor and there was no room for anything but growing up as fast as we could. But maybe this kid has a chance, you know?"

 

  I smiled. “Of course it’ll have a chance. No more hiding, okay?"

 

  “No more hiding,” she echoed. Octavia paused for a moment. “So I guess, with the baby, I can’t eat raw eggs or alcohol. I can’t race Raven through underbrush on horseback. And no more fighting, sword or otherwise. No sparring, even."

 

  “Which of those is hardest?”

 

  Octavia smiled. “Not sure yet.

 

  - - - - - 

 

 

  It was a week later, one of those nights where everything sat still. Everyone was sleeping and I was watching the fire turn to embers when Raven walked into the cabin with a bottle of hooch in her hand. She set down her backpack and shrugged off her coat. Raven took the blanket off my bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. She looked like the kind of goddess no one sang about, anymore.

 

  “Where’d you get that?” I whispered, pointing at the bottle she carried. 

 

  “Stole it,” she said happily, and plopped down onto the floor, leaning against the side of my bed. Her hair was damp, hanging past her shoulders, and she smelled of lye soap. Raven’s shoulder brushed against mine and she turned the bottle over in her hands. “Well, actually Sinclair left it on his desk. Maybe he wanted me to have it, I don’t know. But I was saving it for a special occasion.”

 

   “Good, because you need a drink. Badly,” I said, and my head lolled against the bedpost. “What’s the occasion?"

 

   “The anniversary of my first spacewalk,” Raven said, pulling out the cork with her fingernails. “And my first heart tremor. And my birthday."

 

   “Happy birthday,” I breathed watching as she tilted her head back and take a long drink. “How old are you turning?”

 

  “Twenty,” she said, wiping her mouth and passing the bottle to me. Her hand rested on her knee, just barely touching my own. 

 

   “God. It’s like I’m a fucking babysitter,” I said, taking a sip out of the bottle she’d swiped. Still nasty, burning all the way down. “Should I even be letting you drink? You know, I think I’m a bad influence."

 

   “Shut the hell up, Blake,” she said, trying not to grin. “You can’t talk. Give it a couple years and you’ll be in diapers.”

 

  “Maybe then you’ll act grown," I said, and she flipped me off. I shook my head, passing the bottle back to her. We sat in silence for awhile, watching the fire and passing the bottle back and forth. At one point she got up and fond some sticks to roast bits of food over the fire. Raven told me about her day, her shoulders hanging heavy. She got tipsy before I did, smiling at everything I said. Collapsing into quiet bouts of laughter. It was the best thing I’d seen in a long time. 

 

  “Hey, what are you looking forward to in the next year?” I asked her. Her face was the only thing I could really focus on, everything else just not seeming real. 

 

  She raised her eyebrows. “What?”

 

  “Since it’s your birthday,” I said, and nudged her elbow. “I don’t know. My family always did this."

 

  “I don’t think my mom even remembered my birthday,” she said, but this fact didn’t seem to bother her. She tilted her head to the side, contemplating. The fire reflected in her eyes, flames flickering and turning gold in her irises. "I think I’m looking forward to the trees coming back. And the flowers growing. And warm air. I’m done with this rainy snowy bullshit.”

 

  “Springtime,” I said. “You’re looking forward to springtime.”

 

 “Yeah,” she said,her cheeks flushed. This light turned her golden as the sun, something you couldn’t look at directly for fear of being blinded. Raven tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

 

  We sat there she told me about the arrow-shaped scar on her cheekbone, how she’d fallen and hit her face at the edge of a school desk. She had bled all over the place, stifling the cut with a rag while a stranger walked her home. Apparently it didn’t heal for months. 

 

  “I told all the kids in my class that I’d gotten into a fight with the Chancellor,” said Raven, laughing. “That I’d gotten a good punch in before he pulled a knife on me. God, I was a fucked-up kid."

 

  “Well, look how you turned out,” I said.

 

  “A fucked-up adult?”

  “A good person,” I said, and she was close, she was closer than she was a moment before. She exhaled and I ran my thumb over her scar and thought about all the places we’d been, all the places we’d go. "The kind of person you’d follow to the ends of the Earth.”

 

  “I think you’ve been reading too much poetry,” she breathed, and now I could smell the alcohol on her breath. Her hands rested on my shoulders, a promise, the warning sign before you drive off the end of the world. But she was here and she was kind, despite herself. It felt as if nothing had changed. Raven leaned over and pressed her lips against mine, tasting rancid and sweet. A contradiction. 

 

  My hands went around her waist. Hard muscle under the layers of clothing, under the warm skin. She was beautiful in the way of a magpie’s treasure, picked from the rubble and the ruin, different from anything I’d ever seen. Raven kissed like she meant it. 

 

  When I pulled away, her lips were parted just a little. Her hands untwined from my hair. We were still a breath away, breathing the same air saturated with woodsmoke and hooch and the lye soap on her skin. We looked at each other for a long moment. Then I got into my bed and she got into her little bedroll on the floor, and the embers of the fire were turning from yellow to orange to burnt red. 

 

  “Best birthday ever,” she murmured into the darkness. 

 

 


End file.
